


Heart, Fear Nothing

by Kasuchi



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 05:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kasuchi/pseuds/Kasuchi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Heart, fear nothing, for heart, thou shalt find her.</i> Steve Rogers goes on a road trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart, Fear Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eonism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eonism/gifts).



> This story was written mostly on a train ride home one evening. This has taken me months to edit and finish. Spoilers for the films and nothing else, not even deleted scenes. This is a character study.

"Leave of absence."

Those are the words that bring Steve snapping back to attention. He'd been listening to Fury's debrief with half a mind, the other half tuned to the faint, still-present ringing in his ears. He had been trying to identify the pitch when Fury's words finally broke through.

Embarrassingly, it's his own voice, soft but still clearly astonished, that breaks the silence. "Really?" He can feel his stomach bottom out, his heart rate suddenly rising.

Fury's features soften slightly. "Yes, Captain. We won't track any of you. Once Thor has taken Loki back, you're all free to do as you wish."

The rest of the meeting gets drowned out by the rush of white noise in his ears. _At last_ , he thinks. _Finally_.

&&&

The red leather jacket is soft and beat with age. It's done in the style he is slowly realizing is called _retro chic_ , whatever that means. He didn't really understand fashion back in his own time, anyway. The serum can't help with that.

(He thinks about her in the red dress, the upward quirk of her mouth and is always torn. Sometimes, he takes the hard, heavy length of himself in his hands, imagining nights and stolen moments that never were and never will be. Other nights, he resists and falls into fitful dreams of domesticity, knowing these are a different kind of lie he has to tell himself.)

The modern clothes are different. The materials feel strange, all synthetic fibers (one of the jackets he's given feels like it's lined with a parachute -- which it is) and everything has to be tailored to fit him better. It is uncomfortable, how low-cut and loose it fits. He keeps wanting to belt his pants higher, tuck his shirt in and slick over his hair.

Stark chides him. "Stop it," he admonishes, and slaps Steve's hands away. "That's how they're supposed to fit, geez." Steve surrenders to Stark's taste and finds his bags packed with shirts that look like undershirts, pants that look like the bottom half of overalls, and underwear like children's short pants. The jacket and the practical, sturdy boots are his choices, are clothes he understands and cherishes for their familiarity.

It isn't until later he realizes how limited the color palette is. He appreciates the joke all the same, but he switches out most of the red and white for olive and gray.

&&&

There's clothes, and food, and rations-- _Food_ , he tells himself. _It's just food, now._ \-- in the bag, but there's also dogtags and a wallet, and a leather envelope that, when untied, reveals papers, a passport, legitimacy. It's been only a couple of months since he woke from his coma, and days since they finished helping out the Midtown cleanup efforts. Everything has moved so fast.

He drives through Pennsylvania, passing farmland as he takes the US roads in lieu of the interstates. He had ridden on the service road of one for several miles, overwhelmed by the multiple lanes of traffic flying past him. The US roads are more his speed. This part, at least, feels familiar.

Everything else is unfamiliar. He remembers reading pulp novels as a teenager, bought from the dime store (nothing costs a dime anymore, he's learned) and read on the train to his aunt's home. Stories about men in times not their own. It's easier to go back into the past, he thinks. People knew what the past was. The future, _this_ future. He could never have imagined it. In his jacket pocket is a device smaller than the palm of his hand, and in it is more information than he can fathom, more functionality than he can keep straight. He is 23, but he may as well be his actual 93. He remembers the odd look in everyone's eyes as he fumbled with the cell phone for the first time. It was something like amusement. 

The motorcycle, though. It he understands. The hum of the engine below him, the vibrations in his hands. All of it makes him feel alive, makes him feel young, makes him remember that he's considered a child in this society. Being 23 in 1944 was a very different experience entirely. 

He pulls on his helmet and raises the kickstand, starting the motor as he pulls his feet onto the footrests. _This,_ he thinks. _This part never changes._

&&&

His bank account balance looks astronomically high, until he remembers that stamps are fifteen times more expensive, and so is just about everything else. Regardless, it's clear he doesn't really have to worry about money, so he doesn't.

At night, when the motel beds are lumpy and he can't sleep, he writes letters to those he left behind. A letter to Bucky, promising to never forget. Letters to his parents apologizing for not coming to visit them in almost seventy-five years. (Their gravestones, in Brooklyn, stand in the same corner they had way back. The more things change.) He tells his mother he loves her, tells his father that he's living a life worth being proud of. He writes to Dugan and Jones and Morita and Falsworth and Dernier, hoping they survived and kept on doing good. 

He writes to Peggy, saying all the things he probably should have said seventy years too late. In his letters -- _Letters? No one sends letters anymore_ , he hears Howard Stark's son saying in his mind -- he tells her everything. Stories from his childhood, his own hopes and dreams, small moments from missions that never made the debriefs, trouble he and Bucky used to get into. He fills pages telling her more than he probably would have told her in reality.

Then again, he'll never know what he would have told her, if things had been different.

&&&

He decides to motorbike across the country. It proves a good decision. For one, it gives him time to catch up on this time. He picks up a history text in Lawrence, Kansas and reads that by lantern light as he camps out at rest stops. Sometimes he stares at the stars until he nods off, drawing constellations and tracing the Milky Way point by point.

For another, it lets him remember what America is. He helps raise a barn in Kentucky and corrals loose sheep in Texas. He helps rebuild Oklahoma City when a tornado runs through suburbs, and offers a hand when there's flooding in Ohio. Steve is an extra pair of hands firefighting in Arizona, an extra body in a candlelight vigil in Colorado, an extra pair of eyes on a search-and-rescue effort in Idaho. In Seattle, he plants trees, and in Sacramento he clears litter off of the highway.

He tells a member of the cleanup crew parts of his story as he spears styrofoam and paper on the highway shoulder, orange vest flapping in the wind. She laughs, strawberry blonde hair falling out of the low ponytail, and says he's like Forrest Gump. She laughs harder at his blank look. When they're done, she presses an address and her phone number into his hand. 

He shows up at a nondescript apartment building when she has told him to and knocks. He's a little nervous; in another time, showing up to a woman's residence at night alone was cause for scandal. 

Of course, all his thoughts scatter when she opens her door, dressed simply in some kind of flowy shirt and indecently short shorts, hair in low pigtails over her shoulders. "Oh hey," Karen greets, and steps aside. "Come in, come in." He steps into her apartment and is struck by how lived-in it feels. There's a large sofa, books in shelves on the wall, and food all over the table and counters. Scattered about are a handful of people, a few of whom he recognizes from the cleanup. 

"Uh, hi," he greets, and gives a short wave. "I'm Steve." 

The group of people wave back and introduce themselves. He notes the stack of shoes by the door and bends down to pull off his boots. When he straightens, Karen is holding hands with another young woman, this one sporting short, dark hair and freckles. "Steve, this is my girlfriend, Mel." 

Mel sticks her hand out and beams, a big toothy grin that Steve can't help but return. "Nice to meetcha," the girl says, her voice rough and tinged with a Boston accent. 

"Pleasure's all mine," he replies.

Karen claps her hands together. "All right! Let's get this party started!"

"Party?" Steve replies faintly.

Mel rolls her eyes. "Ignore her. We're watching _Forrest Gump_ tonight for some reason. Karen said she invited you over specifically for that."

Steve frowns. "It's a movie? I thought it was a person."

Mel huffs a laugh. "Okay, I see why you're here. Come on, grab a seat." 

So he does. And, a few beers later, if a cute grad student from UC Davis ends up in his lap, well. It's not like anyone ever expected him to be a _saint_.

&&&

He goes to church every Sunday and hears black, white, Korean, Southern Baptist and Mormon and Catholic and Presbyterian and Methodist and Unitarian, preachers and reverends and fathers and pastors telling their communities and congregations to support one another, for America is stronger when we help each other. Steve sits in the back and watches as people hold hands (or do not hold hands) and sing or speak or call and respond.

This is not the America he left, and yet it still is.

In Texas, he eats at Vietnamese restaurants and at barbeque houses that date back 130 years. In Louisiana, he samples real gumbo and in Georgia he stops for soul food and real Southern-style home cooking. On his way out of New York, he had stopped in Pennsylvania for sloppy, greasy, _delicious_ cheesesteak. 

In Illinois, he has goulash the likes of which stick to his ribs for days. In Arizona, he eats at Mexican restaurants slotted into tiny corners of strip malls, the corn tortillas served up by the family's matriarch. She pinches his cheeks and insists he call her _abuelita_ , because apparently everyone else does. 

As he zooms through California, he stops at Szechuan and Hunan and Henan and Xi'an dives, sampling noodles and rice and soup dishes. He stumbles into an Indian restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles, attached to a motel, and the owners' children eat with him, tearing through baskets of flatbreads and bowls of steaming authentic Indian curries and lentil soups eaten over rice.

In Sacramento, the kids (he shouldn't call them that, he's their age, but sometimes the gap feels much larger) take him -- more like _drag_ really -- to Korean barbeque, where they laugh at the faces he makes knocking back soju. After he's pleasantly full, they then pull him to karaoke, where he performs only standards (he honestly don't know any of the other songs) and cheers along with the rest of them. 

Somewhere around three in the morning, the eight of them eat Korean tacos from a truck parked nearby. His is slathered in kimchi and includes a small side of phở and a glass of mango lassi. 

It's basically one of the most perfect nights of his new life.

&&&

He crashes on Karen's couch for like a week, cleaning and doing dishes while she's in class. When she comes back to a pristine house, she beams and claps her hands delightedly.

"You _must_ be gay, no straight man I know is this tidy."

He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. "Old habits die hard, I guess." He just barely stops himself from calling her ma'am. 

She outright laughs and then drags him along with her girlfriend and a couple of other people to dim sum.

Afterwards, when they're all stuffing themselves full of frozen yogurt (man, wouldn't Bucky just die if he heard that), he asks a question that's been bothering him for days. "Do you guys ever study?"

The group chuckles. Mel bumps Karen's shoulder, who explains. "You came at a good week. We all just finished one round of midterms, and the quarter end-projects haven't been assigned yet. It's our one week to do anything."

Mel butts in. "Plus, it's pretty clear you haven't lived a whole lot, so we like taking you out."

He laughs, and then leans forward. "So, where to next?"

&&&

He drives slowly to San Francisco, taking every detour and side street he can until stalling isn't a viable option. He pulls up in front of the assisted living center, the Spanish-style building resembling a spa more than anything else. He can see terraces with plants and chairs in even, equidistant intervals.

He walks in, boots practically clacking on the polished tile, and approaches the front desk. "Hello, I'm Steve Rogers. I called ahead?"

The receptionist nods and checks her log. "Ah, yes. She's in the garden. Mark, one of our caregivers, will take you to her." The man beside her smiles and gestures for Steve to follow. He adjusts his bag and dutifully falls into step with the white-clad caregiver. As they pass through the archway onto the wide porch, Steve feels the hair on his arms and on the back of his neck rise. This is it. 

They walk through an opening in the shrubbery, following a paving stone path that seemed to wind in a very deliberate fashion. As they crest a hill, Mark stops and points. "There, in the chair. That's Miss Margaret."

Steve nods his thanks and walks the remaining distance alone, going slowly so as not to alarm her. He's a few feet behind her when he realizes her view is of a meadow, the flowers bending in the breeze like waves of water. He stands behind her for a few moments, watching her. The brown waves he'd imagined running his fingers through are properly silver now, pinned up and back save for a stray curl that falls across her cheek and temple. It flutters in the wind. 

He wants to tuck it behind her ear. 

Carefully, he takes off the bag he had slung across his chest, the satchel falling with a thump behind her chair.

"Oh, just a minute more, Mark," he hears her say, her voice soft and still British and carried by the wind. 

He takes a step towards her, and then another. "For you, Agent Carter, I'll give you two." 

She gasps and moves to turn, but he is already kneeling beside her, hands clasping hers. "Steve," she breathes. "It can't be." 

He presses his lips to the backs of her hands, the skin loose and weathered, her hands thinner than he remembers. But there, in her still-clear brown eyes, he sees the girl he remembers from three months (seventy years) ago. He can see it in her face, beyond the lines and wear. Her cheekbones, her sly smile, it is her, and he can feel his heart racing. 

"You've got to be a dream," she breathes, and touches his face. He leans into the hand, covering it with his own.

"Not a dream," he replies. "They fished me out of the iceberg and brought me back, Agent Carter."

"Peggy," she says firmly, looking him dead in the eye. "You call me Peggy. I haven't been Agent Carter in a long time." 

He smiles. "Yes, of course. Peggy."

&&&

He reads her every letter he wrote, every feeling and fantasy and dream. In turn, she fills in all the gaps that the history the book couldn't cover.

Steve never lets go of her hand.

**Author's Note:**

>   1. Title (and summary) are from the poem "Love in a Life" by Robert Browning. I've loved his poem for a long time; I'm glad I got to use it here.
>   2. Steve's reunion with Peggy takes a leaf out of [the Justice League book](http://youtu.be/0XsBpGcEcwM?t=3m54s). Marvel characters aren't the only ones punching out fake Nazis, or having time travel jet lag, or their hearts broken by being displaced out of time.
>   3. This was started before the deleted scene was leaked, so I remember having serious mixed feelings about whether I should keep Peggy alive or not. It was a tough call, but I (obviously) opted to keep her alive.
>   4. This fic is for **eonism** , who edited the story for me. She had all the right feelings, so I'm giving this fic to her.
> 



End file.
